The Great Convergence is upon us. No, not you, Ahmadinejad. You took the wrong train. Cox and Forkum's totally awesome cover illustration of the very latest thing (above left) -- Deborah of Eat Your History's print-on-demand Blogalicious: A Cookbook of Favorite Recipes from the Blogosphere [via Beth of MVRWC] -- and Time Mag's cover for their end-of-year, please-renew-your-subscription, please-renew-your-subscription "Person of the Year" issue are sisters under the skin. C&Fs illustration resonates and enchants and renews our faith in humanity. Time's cover in its own cool, meatless, pandering-lite way gets it too, big time. The rectangle of the screen on their cover illustration is tipped with a piece of mylar so that you see a fun-house-distorted image of yourself when you gaze upon it. Future generations of scholars will have a field day with that.
"It just confirms my belief that the eye is supreme in taking a brilliant photo. The camera is secondary," Pakistani artist Ali Khurshid told a Time reporter working on the magazine's fascinating "Person of the Year: You" story, "Power to the People." We haven't been able to stomach Time for decades, having long ago outgrown its breathless prose style and left-lite editorial bias. But as we were surfing last night across the vast wasteland that is Saturday-night TV on the cables, we stumbled into an irresistible behind-the-scenes story with CNNs cutie-pie anchorette Soledad O'Brien on the magazine's "POTY" 2006 issue. Irresistible because it is about us, Glenn Reynolds's Army of Davids. Checking the story online, we still found the style breathless and the editorial bias left lite -- "Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming" -- but the overall concept is sound, and the issue is embedded with gems, like that quotation from the Pakistani artist that opens this paragraph. What with our having what our sis and we call a "good eye" for what we call "beauty in unexpected places," we couldn't agree more. Here's Time's take:
The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.
And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.
We think they get it. And that's the beauty of it all. MSM numbers have been tanking, but here we are reading and blogging about Time, fergossake. Not that we or any other news "consumer" will read the whole thing. We won't. Our favorite part of Soledad's outstanding coverage was the segment on how they put the final cover together, tipping in the mylar mirror. Now about that bloggers' cookbook . . . How come nobody asked us? Had they, we would have sent this favorite from our own virtual cookbook:
"Ready for the Big Test, Peeps roost at attention," we wrote in the caption to the above photo of our epic "A holiday tradition is hatched" post last year, wherein we attempted to answer the age-old question "Which came first?" in the context of posting a classic recipe that transcends all seasons.
There's a typo in this post but no way to fix it till we get back home. Goomp's XP program is telling us there's a "stack overflow" . . . Teresa, please help. What's going on here?
Posted by: Sissy Willis | December 17, 2006 at 09:33 AM
Also, why doesn't anyone ever talk about XP's search problem? Every other time I try to search in XP, it freezes up, and I have to start from scratch.
Posted by: Sissy Willis | December 17, 2006 at 10:15 AM
Sorry I've been trying to finish all the Christmas stuff and although I dashed in earlier to read - I ended up having to dash back out again without having read a thing... ARG!!! Hate when that happens.
Hmmm... sounds like Goomp's XP has some issues and not good ones. I wish I had a copy of the "stack overflow" error message. That would help a lot, meantime I'll do some searching myself and see what I come up with. Might be a spyware problem (that would certainly be my guess if you're having trouble doing searches)
Email me if you have any other info I could use. :-)
Posted by: Teresa | December 18, 2006 at 11:23 PM